Generations

Posted on May 21, 2025 by thezman

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Note: On Tuesday nights, I participate in a Twitter space where we discuss spicier topics than you find in the news. The replay of last nights episode here

Generational politics is one of the cruder forms of politics as it generally reduces to members of one age cohort hurling slurs at other cohorts. Ironically, the origin of this form of politics is the baby boomer generation, who were the first group of Americans to form an identity around their birth cohort. Baby boomers have since been synonymous with the post-war cultural trends and the radical politics that came to dominate the second half of the twentieth century.

These days, of course, “boomer” has become an epithet due to their children using it to describe degenerate or materialistic culture. Boomers are selfish old people who only care about their stock portfolios and their lawns. They are the “greedy geezers” of this age, which is ironic in that the term first gained traction decades ago as the baby boomers started to take over politics. This is another example of how the universe has a sense of a humor and cruel streak.

Of course, thirty years ago when terms like “greedy geezer” were getting tossed around, the culture was undergoing a generational shift. The WW2 Generation was giving way to the baby boomers. Bill Clinton came to be seen as the typical boomer, ushering in a new set of morals and sensibilities to politics. For the last thirty years, baby boomer politics have been American politics. Now they are seen the out of date politics of a quickly fading era.

We are about to experience another generational culture shift as the children of the baby boom generation begin to push their parents over the side. This is why the term “boomer” has become an epithet. The derogatory use of the label is a signal that the user is not into conventional culture and politics. To reject “boomer politics” is to reject the old-fashioned dichotomy of left-versus-right, as is defined by cable news programs, talk radio and the mainstream media.

We are getting a glimpse of this in the Trump administration. Donald Trump is technically not a baby boomer. This must be said because otherwise you get six million messages explaining that the baby boomer generation starts with those born after noon on June 30th, 1946, and Trump was born on June 17, 1946. It is this sort of hairsplitting that makes generation politics so mind-numbingly stupid. It makes the blue pencil crowd seem stable minded by comparison.

That aside, Trump is emblematic of the politics and culture that we generally associate with the baby boomer generation. He is materialistic, hedonistic, and jarringly superficial in his politics. For example, his main interest in ending the Ukraine war is so we can do business deals with the Russians. The history and geopolitical import of what he is doing is never mentioned by him. For Trump, it often seems like that the only thing that matters is the acquisition of stuff.

Contrast this with J.D. Vance, the millennial man in waiting. His story is centered on his cultural journey from the underclass into the managerial class and then as a critic of the managerial system that made him possible. He is the most articulate critic of managerialism to ever hold office in Washington. It remains to be seen if he wins the White House on his own, but he is clearly setup as the heir to Trump. He will take the baton on behalf of his generation from the boomers.

Despite the millennial disdain for baby boomer culture, they are the results of it due to the fact they were raised in the product of it. Things like helicopter parenting and structured play time were boomer creations. Millennials are the first generations raised by people who used the word “parenting”, so it is no surprise that the millennials are the first to use the word “adulting.” They were raised to expect a highly structured and safe environment where everything is clearly labeled.

There is far greater cultural intensity with millennials than prior generations. For the boomers, generational politics was mostly about marketing cultural items like clothing, lifestyle choices, and music. For millennials, culture is tangled up in the structure of life, so they are more keenly aware of themselves as a cohort. They are the first generation to sense that their identity is entirely exogenous. Individually and collectively, they are who they are because of taxonomical reasons.

This shift in generational identity can be seen in how millennials react to generalizations versus how baby boomers react. Make a generalization about baby boomers and you get flooded with boomers telling you that they are not like that. Make a generalization about millennials and they will agree and amplify it. Because conformity has always been a part of millennial cultural awareness, conforming to generational stereotypes does not bother them. It is their normal.

This is another thing with millennials that is different from boomers. They expect the systems they inherited to work as described on the box. The two sides of millennial politics are from those raised on the mother’s milk of post-Marx culturalism and those raised on civic nationalism. The former is perpetually angry that things are not fair, and the latter is determined to make things work as described to them. Vance versus AOC is a duel between competence and anxiety.

That brings up something else about millennial culture. It is focused on the present, but in the context of what was promised. This makes it backward looking. The Vance side is determined to remake things, so they are what he expected, rather than something new that is a break from the past. The AOC side is similarly determined to remake the present to fit the promise, but the promise came from the New Left politics that sunk roots in the culture when her parents were kids.

Generational politics can only take you so far in getting a sense of what lies ahead for the culture and politics. Reality is the great restraint, and the millennials are inheriting an enterprise in decline, while their parents inherited one that was at its peak. This is the heart of the millennial critique of the boomers. They see their parents as living off the profits of the past and they see themselves as tasked with cleaning up the mess after a long generational party.

This is why the millennial age could turn out to be quite conservative. Necessity will mean relegating luxury beliefs to the fringe. No one has time for the hysterical and childish politics of the AOC side when there is work to be done, debts to be paid and institutions to be restructured. Millennial politics could be the domination of the organizational men, who take pride in making the machine operate and have no tolerance for throwing sand in the gears.

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The Banality Of Biden

Posted on May 20, 2025 by thezman

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Hannah Arendt coined the term “banality of evil” while covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. She noted that Eichmann was not the cartoonish villain one expected, given the accusations against him. Instead, he appeared to be a normal man who performed the tasks assigned to him, without having any ideological or emotional attachment to them. This led Arendt to argue that evil could be the result of the work of ordinary people who were not inherently malicious.

Her formulation turned out to be useful to generations of evil people who used this framework to accuse ordinary Americans of being evil, for the crime of living their lives as white people. That was probably why the line became so popular, but that does not strip it of its truth value. Human systems are capable of turning the ordinary acts of the people in the system toward evil ends, even though the people themselves may not be evil in the ordinary way we think of it.

This is the subtext to the broad indictment of managerialism. The fascists, understood through the lens of managerialism, created a ruthless machine, animated by ideology, that dehumanized their society. The Soviets were close behind in creating a communist machine that forced everyone into the moral framework of the ideology. Those who could not fit into the ideology were destroyed. This is what made fascism and communism evil. They mechanized and normalized brutality.

Of course, that view of fascism and communism was from the perspective of people on the cusp of post-liberalism. The paleocons, sensing that America was succumbing to the same managerial forces as Europe, were warning about what lies ahead for managerialism as an organizing political order. They were wrong in their analysis, as America ceased to be a liberal society in the 19th century. Progressivism, the unique American ideology, was filling the void in the 20th century.

This turned out to be the great innovation of progressivism. It appropriated the language and forms of liberalism in order to present itself as the antithesis of ideology. It was the broad conclusion of reason. Progressivism, repackaged as liberalism in the Cold War, was not about how the world ought to be, but about how the world would be if only people allowed it to be so. Man, liberated from superstition and ignorance, would naturally settle into liberal democracy.

The result, however, was what the paleos predicted. The managerial revolution that began in the first quarter of the 20th century got going for the same reason it got going in communist and fascist societies. Ideology is not enough. It needs a practical application that takes the moral claims and turns them into an ethical system administered by a priestly class. The role of the priest in a Christian society is filled by the manager in an ideological society.

It is why America is awash of moralizing. Every politician eventually turns himself in an Old Testament prophet, warning that we must comply with the tides of history or face certain destruction. Every product is sold as a sacrament. Buy this widget in order to tell the world you are a righteous man. Middle managers in corporations are sent off to leadership class, so they can properly evangelize to their cubicle jockeys. The most trivial things are attached to great moral crusades.

This brings us back to Arendt’s observations about Eichmann. The crimes against civilized life we have observed over the last years were done by people, who like Eichmann, did not present themselves as evil. They could not imagine themselves as evil because they were on the right side of history. The proof of that is everyone they know is on the same side and everyone they know is a good person striving to make the world a better place.

It is this system of thought that made Joe Biden president. He was the smiling face of a machine that rewarded affable, useful dullards, as long as they served the needs of the system, which was the endless hunt for enemies of the system. The peak of the woke terror produced President Joe Biden, the guy who was supposed to normalize the terror by making ordinary people accept it as normal. How can “Working Class Joe” be a bad guy when he is always telling jokes and smiling?

It is why it is right to think about Joe Biden as the Eichmann of woke. Just as Eichmann and many men like him were the banal face of the underlying evil of the system, Joe Biden was the avuncular, jovial face of the American managerial system. He is not unique, but typical, the good example of the type that has come to dominate the political class, which is the fig leaf for the managerial class. The smiling, backslapping pol is what stands between the citizen and the machine.

Stripped of the charming rogues and pitchmen, the evil of the machinery is made plain and therefore easy to resist. That is the part of Arendt’s observations about Eichmann that applies to us now. Even if neither man can be accused of evil on the individual basis, their talents were put to use by an evil system. Even if one can show that their intent was not evil, it does not matter. They helped normalize evil and that is arguably worse than the evil itself.

It is tempting to think this is an inappropriate comparison, given the death sentence that has been handed to Biden. In 1961, however, when Eichmann was given his death sentence, the system which he served was long gone and the damage it wrought was gone with it. Joe Biden is still causing damage. His cancer diagnosis is now removing the last bits of trust in the system. The life of Joe Biden and now his looming death, has been in service to the destruction of social trust.

It was hard to hate men like Eichmann, even after their actions had been universally condemned, because they were not obviously evil men. That was always the point of Joe Biden and why the managerial class loved him. He was a simpleton and braggard, but he would ruthlessly execute his instructions and do so in a way that was hard for the people to hate. He normalized evil by making it feel like the way things were done and had to be done. Joe Biden is the banality of evil.

Happy Campers

Posted on May 19, 2025 by thezman

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Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the classic film, The Maltese Falcon, a post about my trip to the Old Glory Club, and no Sunday podcast. I got back too late on Sunday to do a show, but I will post something extra this week about the conference or maybe a second video. On the Substack side of the green door, there are now weekly videos. Subscribe here or here.

One of the realities of the late managerial age is that the sorts of numbers managers love and therefore produce in volume, are increasingly unreliable and often manufactured to fit an agenda. Good data is usually too late to be actionable or is simply the accurate version of the previously reported fake data. Economic data is the most obvious example of this trend. It used to be central to the news cycle but has now become so corrupt the media will ignore it.

In the Biden years, much like the Obama years, it became popular with the reporting agencies to produce fake economic numbers and then come back at a later date to “revise” the previous data so they could pretend they were being accurate. It was always a cycle where new data contained information about how the previous data was revised in a way negative to the administration, but often made the new data look like the administration was doing a great job.

Peak managerial mendacity was Covid. The CDC stopped reporting deaths as a real-time number so they could report fictionalized accounts of bodies in the streets, always somewhere not where you live, which explained why you did not see the bodies in the streets, but they were somewhere! Old metrics that relied on hard data, like dead people showing up in morgues, were massaged to the point where you could no longer get the number of actual dead people.

We are getting a version of this now that Trump is back. His tariff plan has kicked off a new genre of managerial horror stories. These come in the form of economic reports that, like the bodies in the streets phenomenon, always focus on a part of the country where you do not live. Somewhere there are empty Walmart shelves due to the trade war with China. There are people you do not know who are shocked by the rise in prices, even though your prices have declined.

The cycle for management is always the same. First, they produce reliable numbers from trusted sources to measure their performance. Then they create models from those numbers to justify their continued employment. This is when they begin to reimagine how the old data is collected and before long, we have theories about how best to manage information, which always underscores the need for management to keep a tight control on the narratives.

Bankruptcy usually follows that last phase, or at least an economic crisis great enough to warrant restructuring. That is because reality is indifferent to the model makers and will eventually break every model. We are living through a version of this process in the twilight of managerialism. Since the Obama, years the choice has been between your lying eyes and the model of reality presented by management. Enough people picked the former and we are now undergoing a change in management.

For example, during the Biden years we were told that the economy was going great and those grumbling about egg prices were ingrates. Now that Trump is in power, the media say we are in a depression. Go on the roads right now and you will be confronted with miles of RV’s and campers. This week, which leads to Memorial Day weekend, the nation’s highways will be full of the things. So much so that massive traffic jams will be a feature of the weekend.

Why does this matter? RV’s and campers have long been a useful metric for the economy and the public perception of the economy. The more people hitting the roads for campgrounds and parks, the better the economy. In 2023, the industry went into a deep recession to the point where many companies shut down production. Then it started to slowly bounce back in 2024. Now it is undergoing a boom with the highways now flooded with happy campers.

This used to be a metric discussed in public, but like so many of these things, it fell out of favor in the Obama years. Management and its marketing department, what we call the media, decided that the customers really did not know best, so they scrapped those numbers in favor of metrics that flattered management. The reason they are in the jam that they currently find themselves is they started to believe their models of reality instead of facing reality. Now there is a hostile takeover underway.

A cruder and more hilarious version of this process is the recent reporting of Joe Biden’s health and fitness. The data in this case was our eyes. Everyone not blinded by their own models of reality saw a frail, doddering old man. Management’s model, however, showed that he was a model of fitness and virility. Now that model is being revised to show he was actually suffering from dementia and has aggressive cancer. The new model is now converging with reality.

The Biden story is a version of the basis trade, which pits models of a point in the future and the models are continuously updated until the point is reached. It is a way for the model makers to think they can control the future, so it makes sense that the people running America Inc. would think in these terms. They just forgot about the part that says in the end, reality always wins. That is what you see on the road. America is happy with the state of things, so they are going camping.

The Progressive Formula

Posted on May 13, 2025 by thezman

American progressivism in its current form can be summarized as an ideology that claims, “we must do A or B will happen.” The A in this formula can be just about anything and often flips from positive to negative. There are times when doing A reverses and the warning is to stop doing it. On the other hand, the B factor is always a negative consequence of the first term. Usually, it is a vague suggestion that it is not just bad but the end of civilization as we know it.

The obvious example is the weather. On the grand scale, the first term will be something like driving cars or heating our homes, while the second term is climate change, which means climate disaster. If we keep driving cars the climate will change in such a way that earth dies. They never make that second term explicit, but the extinction stuff is assumed. After all, climate changes all the time and has often been to our benefit, but that just muddies the waters.

That gets to the other aspect of this formulation. The person or people involved assume that their normative evaluation of both terms is correct. They may be justifying their prejudice against A on the grounds that it leads to B, but they always assume that B is a bad thing that moral people should seek to avoid. You see this with climate change, which is recast as a moral condition, rather than an observation. It is a bad thing not a simple observation of earth’s behavior.

The Gaia worship stuff is easy, but it turns up everywhere, even in mundane things like foreign policy. For a few decades now the American foreign policy establishment has been warning that if Iran gets nuclear weapons, then it will be a disaster. It is in the title of this post at one of the Claremont sites. The post is a veiled argument in favor of going to war with Iran on behalf of Israel. The post is in response to another post on the subject that dismisses this progressive formulation.

What we see with Iran are two variations of the same theme. One is “If we do not do A then B will happen.” The other is “If they are able to do A, then B will happen.” Sometimes they are linked together to get something like, “If we do not do A then they will do B and then C will happen.” The point of this formulation is to avoid examining the second term. The debate must center on the first part, what we ought or ought not do, while accepting the general badness of B.

Again, the Gaia business is an easy example. Every debate on climate policy centers on that first term and never debates the second term. It is always assumed by all sides allowed in the debate, that climate change is bad. In fact, a condition of getting into the debate is that you accept that climate change is morally bad. Your reason for accepting Gaia as your lord and savior may be different from others who accept Gaia, but accepting Gaia is the only way into the debate.

Note that Spivak in his response to Dobson spends a lot of his time smearing Dobson as immoral or otherwise out of bounds. One point of the Spivak post is to anathematize Dobson and anyone who dares question B. Central to the claims of Spivak is that everyone must accept his normative claims about Iran going nuclear. That way, the debate is reduced to the ways to prevent it, since a nuclear Iran is assumed to be a disaster for the world.

It is the natural way progressives control public debate. This is the heart of the debate between those two posts on Iran. Dobson, the author of the post at the start of the exchange, is questioning the veracity of B. He is correct that there are no arguments to support the claim. The evidence we have says that if Iran gets the bomb, they will become even less aggressive toward Israel. We see this with India and Pakistan where nuclear weapons keep the peace.

Spivak, on the other hand, simply cannot accept Dobson’s questioning of B in the well-worn formulation, so he repeats all of the ways people have said, “If A then B” over the years regarding Iran and nuclear weapons. The reason for this is that any change in B invalidates the formula. Suddenly, A does not necessarily lead to B, which then causes a revaluation of the set of choices in A. It also removes the necessity of the person warning, “If we do not do A, then B will happen.”

If there are a set of conditions in which Iran gets the bomb, but like all but one other nuclear country, does not use it, then the debate over American relations with Iran shift from various forms of war with Iran to include peaceful relations with Iran. Suddenly, the war mongers move from being one voice in a choir preaching some form of war, to being war mongers in a room with people calling for peace. They lose their moral high ground and become the high-risk position.

In this regard, progressive ideology inherited the basic formula from Christianity but stripped it of all Christian references. Heaven is just the assumed destination if we follow the progressive formula. If we follow the tides of history, then we will reach the egalitarian paradise. On the other hand, if we do not stop doing a long list of things that meet the requirement of A, then some version of Hell awaits us. The reason our politics is so preachy is that it is dominated by preachers.

Progressivism is secular Christianity of the Protestant variety, which is why all progressive arguments reduce to “Repent or burn in Hell!” You must ride a bike to work, or you will burn in Hell for angering Gaia. We must make war with Iran, or we will burn in Hell for letting her get the bomb. The madness of America stems from the fact that all doors now lead to Hell. There are no choices in the first term that do not lead to the second term and the second term is always Hell.

It is why the antidote to progressive polemics is not facts and reason. Those facts neatly arranged in a chart do nothing to alter the basic progressive formula. Instead, the solution is a revaluation of the values contained in the formula. If the value of B is open to debate, then there is no debate over A. If any part of A is morally questionable, then B ceases to be a consideration. You do not defeat moral claims with facts, but with the dismissal of those moral claims by challenging the underlying assertions.

The Slaves Of The South

Posted on May 12, 2025 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about progressive echo chambers, a post about old televisions and old ways to watch them, and the Sunday podcast. On the Substack side of the paywall side, there are now weekly videos, which are getting better, for those who like video. Subscribe here or here.

A topic that comes up regularly is why the Southern states produced so many terrible Republican politicians. Many of the most perfidious elected officials in Washington come from states that are solidly Republican. The most obvious is South Carolina, which seems to have a political class as corrupt as Massachusetts. Lindsey Graham might be the slimiest politician in America. Now Thom Tillis of North Carolina is making a run at Graham’s crown.

The voters in the South are some of the most conservative in the country, but they elect most of the unreliable pols in the GOP. If elections worked as people insist, a guy like Graham would not exist. Instead, the state’s senators would reflect the majority of the state’s voters, which are very conservative. The South Carolina delegation would be the fire-eaters of the Republican Party. Alabama and Mississippi would be working hard to set the edge in Republican edginess.

Last week, Thom Tillis finked on the President by pulling his support for Ed Martin, Trump’s nominee for U.S. Attorney in DC. Maybe Tillis took a bribe, which happens so often in Washington now that it is the new normal. More likely, he simply agrees with his friends in the Democratic Party. He agreed to be the Republican who finked on the base this time, taking one for the team so to speak. Next time, another Southern Senator will suddenly decide his principles require him to be a fink.

In states dominated by the left-wing crazies, the pols tend to be even more fanatical than the typical voter in the state. Oregon politicians, for example, are reliable spear catchers for the far-left. One of their Representatives is now living in El Salvador to protest Trump’s deportation of MS-13 gang members. Ocasio-Cortez is now calling for violence against federal immigration officials. In progressive states, the elected officials are always to the left of their voters.

In so-called conservative states and districts, the opposite is true. The defining feature of Republican pols from the most conservative states is their willingness to bend their knee to the people they claim to oppose. They live in fear of being called one of the scary words the crazies use to control their conservative pets. Thom Tillis would urinate himself in public if he were ever called a mean word, so he makes sure to be ahead of all of these things, which means surrendering on every issue.

The main reason for this is the local elites in the South live in shame of their heritage and of the white people they represent. Like booshie people everywhere, they want nothing more than to be invited to the cool kid’s table. Since Gettysburg, the cool kid’s table has been where the progressives sit. The winners get to define what is and what is not cool and that remains true to this day. The United States is a Yankee imperium, and the South is a conquered land.

It is a good example of how control of the centers of cultural production can alter the behavior of the people. The managerial elite is not going to gaslight people into thinking a man in a dress is normal or trick people into embracing black sociopathy, but they can set the cultural tone for the elites. If you want to be popular in the centers of power, Washington, New York, Los Angeles, or Silcom Valley, you better conform to the cultural norms of the trend setters who control those power centers.

It is why Patrick Buchanan once quipped that when Southerners send one of their own to Washington, he quickly goes native. He goes from being his district’s representative to Washington to being Washington’s representative to his district. If you look around at the biggest finks of the Republican Party, they fit that role perfectly. Lindsey Graham hates the people he represents. They are not his people. It is his burden that he was born in such a backward state as South Carolina.

The question is why the voters tolerate it. People like to blame the voters, but when your choice is Graham and a guy with a bone in his nose, you cannot be blamed for voting for Graham. That is the other side of this master – slave relationship. For his loyal service to his friends in Washington, they make sure he never has a serious primary challenger or a serious general election opponent. The loyal colonial official, like Graham, gets the protection of his lord.

It is not just the machinations of the parties that account for this. There are enough white people in the South who are ashamed of themselves to make forming a majority of the proud impossible. The same cultural pressures that make a Thom Tillis ashamed his people work on the locals. Fashionable people in the provinces always ape the ways of those in the big city. Many booshie South Carolinians are as revolted by Southern culture as the typical Manhattanite.

William Faulkner described a South undergoing a transition, where the old elite with roots in the antebellum South, the Compsons, was giving way to a new class, the rapacious, vermin-like Snopes clan. The old elite had a natural superiority about them, but they were ill-suited for the new South. The new elite, on the other hand, was without virtue, so perfectly suited for the new age. They were willing to say anything and sell anything to get an advantage.

Faulkner’s description of the Snopes clan is exactly what you would expect from the ruling elite of a conquered people. They exist not as a genuine elite but as way to prevent the formulation of a genuine elite. The conqueror always wants the conquered to remain conquered and the most efficient way to do that is to make sure their leaders are loyal to the conquerors. Just as the house slaves keep the field slaves from revolting, Southern elites keep the South pacified.

In a democracy, this process is subtle and natural. No one in Washington worries about a revolt against the Yankee imperium. They only have to make sure that the politicians in the provinces are their sort of people. The same sorts of selection pressures that exist in the high school cafeteria exist in official Washington. The social pressures are all one way and as a result, the compliant representing Southern states have long careers, while the difficult drop out of politics.

It is why remedying this at the ballot box is impossible. Efforts to depose Lindsey Graham always fail, because he is the product of a system that is designed to not just defend his kind but produce them from the raw material of popular resistance that might get lucky and beat him in a primary. A populist who beats Graham will go to Washington, and before long he will go native. He will sound just like the other house slaves who serve their masters in the Yankee imperium.

Feudal Net

Posted on May 1, 2025 by thezman

If you are a Twitter user, one of the things you may have noticed is that the site is increasingly difficult to use as intended. The “slop accounts” fill the site with posts intended to game the payment system. It is also infested with “influencers” who, like the slop accounts, seek to gain attention, but instead of doing it for money, they do it for the “clout.” As a result, many popular accounts have reduced their activity on the site, which magnifies the problem.

This is not just a Twitter issue. YouTube suffers from the same problem as artificial intelligence makes it easier for slop merchants to churn out content. They use AI to create a slideshow and voiceover about a topic. It is not a video in the conventional sense, but it is close enough for their purposes. If you watch a video on your favorite historical figure, you will be flooded with artificial intelligence slop videos in your recommended feed. If you are not careful, you end up awash in these slop videos.

Like the slop on Twitter, the slop on YouTube is mostly about gaming the payment system, and most of it originates from India. Even a small amount of money from slop farming goes a long way in a land without indoor toilets. The advance of artificial intelligence might end Indian call centers and coding shops, but it will come with the proliferation of Indian slop centers. The big social media platforms will be swamped by this content unless they figure out how to stop it.

The Google search engine experience suggests it is unlikely that the big social platforms will effectively combat the slop. For the most part, Google is a useless search engine now because they had to implement so many filters to combat the scammers, that the outputs often make little sense. The reason they had to do this was the scammers were finding ways to get their scams at the top of search results, rather than the legitimate results.

It was not helped by Google’s attempt to ban unapproved opinions during the latest spasm of progressive madness. Ironically, you now need artificial intelligence to find things you used to use Google to find. The Brave browser search engine now provides an AI answer at the top of the search results. Most of the time, the AI response is close enough, unless the question is on the list of banned ideas. Even AI has been rigged by our progressive theocrats.

It is not just Indian scammers that are ruining the public square. A strange phenomenon on YouTube is the reaction video. Video makers with no talent create videos of themselves reacting to other videos. They make goofy faces and add inane commentary to reach the required length to monetize the video. The point is to attract the attention of people interested in the primary content. It is a way to exploit the fair use doctrine to steal the work of others for private gain.

Now that reaction videos have proven successful, a new genre has emerged where the YouTuber makes a reaction video to a reaction video. Suppose a home cook makes a recipe video, and a professional chef then makes a reaction video to it. The new “reaction to the reaction” YouTuber then makes a reaction video to the chef reacting to the original video. It is not hard to see where this is heading. It will not be long before it is reaction videos all the way down.

All of this relies on systemic theft. The Twitter slop merchants steal content like images and videos and then use it in their slop posts. If you are at a public event and video something amusing to post online, you can be sure that an Indian slop farmer will steal it, remove any references to you, and then add it to their slop stream. This is why so many video clips now have highly intrusive watermarks. It is an effort to combat the Indian slop farmers.

Ironically, the deluge of slop that promise to swamp the internet was made possible by what made social media possible. The big platforms made their billions stealing information from their users and then selling it to marketing firms and governments. Free email was about harvesting the user’s private correspondence. Your search and browsing history were used without your permission. Big tech ushered in the collapse of personal property, and now they are the victims of the same theft.

The bigger problem is the tragedy of the commons. The internet is the largest public common in human history. While it is not entirely free to access, it is effectively free to use. The Indian scammer does not have to pay for each scam text message he sends to your grandmother. He does not have to pay for each slop tweet he posts on Twitter. The cost to him as a scammer is the same as for you and every other person accessing the digital public common.

The infrastructure providers have an interest in their part of the internet, but they do not have a stake in the public square. The social media firms have an interest in their piece of the common, but their reason to exist is as an open forum for all to enter, so walling it off is against their interests. The public square portion of the digital commons is like an orchard owned in common. Everyone has a reason to take from it, but no one has a reason to protect it.

We will probably end up with a private internet for the same reason we have gated communities, concierge healthcare, and homeowner associations. The open society benefits only those with no stake in it. They take what they want and then move on to the next host. The only defense is the closed society in which admission is determined by private interests. The great democratization of the public square will end with a great feudalization of it.

Our Secular Priests

Posted on April 30, 2025 by thezman

A recurring feature of human society is the class of people who set themselves apart from the rest of society to function as the keepers of public morality. They usually set themselves apart through self-denial, which is a way of showing themselves to be purer than the rest of the lot. It is thought that the Jewish prohibition on eating pork, for example, is a way to set the Jewish people apart from the rest of the people by abstaining from what was considered a dirty animal.

This is why every religion has both dietary laws and prohibitions on certain types of common behavior. It may be that these only apply to the holy men, as was common in the pre-Christian world. They can also be standards against which people measure themselves, as in the Christian world. The ancient shaman was someone expected to sublimate his urges as a sign of his purity. Christians, of course, have many rules that are guides for adhering to Christian ethics.

In the post-Christian age, the priestly class follows a similar pattern. The people we call the managerial elite and their performative proxies in the media have many ways of demonstrating their purity. In fact, we have the phrase “purity spiral” to describe when a group of these people engage in a competition in which they try to prove they are the purest of the bunch. Many of the moral panics over the last decades have been the result of purity spirals that spun out of control.

The public act of piety is another feature of human society. The great man may not be in the priestly class, but he could show his piety by supporting them in some way or by engaging in a public ritual directed by the priestly class. Scipio Africanus was famous for his public acts of piety, which he used to inoculate himself against claims of civic impropriety and corruption. In the Christion era, great men would build cathedrals and monasteries to demonstrate their fidelity to the Church.

We see the same thing in this age. Public figures kneeling in front of the cameras, allegedly in solidarity with the blacks, was no different than the ancients sacrificing a bull to the gods. When they forced their employees to kneel, it was another way of signaling their virtue to each other and the rest of us. The Covid panic, in many respects, was nothing more than a purity spiral among the managerial elite. It is why it had so many outward symbols of obedience to the god of Covid.

Another aspect of this is that the people performing these rituals in public or setting themselves apart through self-denial is that they probably do not think too much about the truth of this stuff. The kneelers did not think much about it at all. They just assumed that they had to show their fidelity to that which everyone else in their class was now sure would provide forgiveness. They were kneeling in order to gain forgiveness on behalf of the sinners called the masses.

You see it in this strange clip of the newly elected leader of Canada. His first public statement after the election is about Gaia. “We have an enormous opportunity to bring climate change into the heart of every financial decision.” After some meaningless managerial drivel, he then promises, “We can deliver the net zero world that you’ve demanded, and that our future generations deserve.” He is saying that he will lead his people to the promised land of salvation.

Of course, his faith is not in God, in the Christian sense, but in people like himself who show themselves as our superior by believing in boutique ideas like climate change and a “net-zero world.” In the ancient world, the priestly class would identify themselves with ornaments on their person. In the Christian age, the priest has an easily recognizable costume. In this age, the priestly class sets itself apart from the rest of us by babbling about nonsense things like climate change.

Note that in this age, the pointlessness of the belief is important. Jews not eating fish or seafood had some practical benefit. Cleanliness had utility. The rituals of the Christian churches provided a way to bind the people to one another in a common ethical framework and common purpose. Other than setting the believer apart, the boutique beliefs of our self-declared priests are pointless. The sanctification of George Floyd appealed to our betters because of its absurdity.

Another reason why holy men find ways to set themselves apart as purer, cleaner, and less human than the rest is they have an underlying contempt for man. The shaman is always warning about the dangers of enjoying life. The priest is always looking for a sinner to torment. The modern clerisy is always seeking some way to display their contempt for the pleasures of regular people. They set themselves apart by setting themselves above that which they despise, their fellow man.

It is why the modern priests are more lethal than those of the past. They inherited the Christian distain for this world and the joys within it. Then they bolted onto it a class consciousness based in contempt for the people over whom they rule. Add in the minority’s natural paranoia and the result is a ruling class that seems to be hellbent on pulling the roof down on Western society. It is not that they hate you. They hate everyone, but they really hate you.

Sulla Or Jugurtha

Posted on April 29, 2025 by thezman

The Trump administration has reached the one-hundred-day point, an historically important point in every presidency. For Trump it is uniquely important as his second term is something of a do-over of his first term. Trump 2.0 is supposed to be a better, improved version of the original, having had a break to learn from the mistakes of the first term and having spent four years under assault from The Blob. This one-hundred-day mark is one of the most important since FDR.

Roosevelt is a good comparison, as what Trump is trying to do is usher in a new period for the country that closes the books on the managerial era that started under Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. It is Roosevelt that gave us this concept of the first one hundred days as a measure of a president. Roosevelt was the new model President for the new model age, one that was active and ambitious, using all the powers of the executive to effectuate change for the people.

There are a lot of parallels between the MAGA and New Deal era, but there is a crucial difference and that is The Blob. Whether they understood it or not, the Roosevelt project was about laying the foundation on which The Blob would be built. The Blob being the vast managerial state that operates outside government and that has subsumed the political system. The army of experts Roosevelt brought to Washington to deal with the Depression created the managerial state.

In contrast, MAGA is about swinging a wrecking ball through the managerial state to remove its tentacles from the throat of the American people. The subtext to the MAGA movement is that this collection of people is responsible for the decline and removing them will restore the conditions in which the people can flourish. While FDR promised a new framework in which the people can flourish, Trump promises to tear down that framework so the people can flourish.

Therein lies the major difference between Roosevelt and Trump. The former did not have an established organized system to obstruct him. The old order was disorganized and discredited. It was ready for a new beginning. Trump, in contrast, has a paranoid and highly organized old order that sees Trump not as an agent of renewal but as a threat to its existence. The Blob views the strong executive, any strong executive, as a threat to its existence, so it will fight to the death.

Unlike FDR, where the rules were being written as needed, Trump is dealing with a system so laden down by rules that even the most skillful manager in the system can only hope to know a part of them. This is the primary defense mechanism of managerialism, a system of rules that operates as defense in depth. Even if one can figure out how to get around and through the rules toward a goal, the rules reform around you like antibodies. You are simply assimilated.

You see this with immigration. The Trump people are appealing to an old law to expeditiously remove criminal aliens. On the surface this is a clever use of the existing rules to achieve a goal contrary to the whims of the system. The court system, however, has now wrapped its tentacles around the Trump people, dragging them into the swamp of endless litigation, court cases, appeals and re-appeals. The clever end run using an old law has led to a new thicket of rules and process.

This raises another parallel for Trump. From the perspective of Washington, Trump is something like Jugurtha, the Numidian king who was a thorn in the side of Rome from 160 BC to 104 BC. Numidia was in North Africa, which was not controlled by the Romans at the time. Jugurtha was unusually skilled at exploiting the moral weaknesses of the Roman elite to get what he wanted from Rome. He came to symbolize what was wrong with the Roman system.

For example, after his first war with Rome, Jugurtha offered to settle things peacefully and walked away with a highly favorable deal from Rome. Bribery was assumed to be the cause, so the local Roman commander was summoned to Rome to face corruption charges and Jugurtha was invited to give testimony. Jugurtha bribed Roman officials who then vetoed the whole thing. In other words, Jugurtha bribed Roman officials to get out of a bribery scandal.

What Jugurtha represented was not an external threat to Rome in the conventional sense, but an existential threat. His existence suggested an irreconcilable flaw in the Roman system. As a result, the Romans determined to eliminate Jugurtha and the tool they used was a man named Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix. Known to us now as Sulla, he was a gifted general who beat Jugurtha at his own game, by getting one of Jugurtha’s allies to turn on him.

Sulla was also a key figure in the long political struggle between the optimates and populares factions at Rome. The former were the Cloud People of the day, while the latter were the Dirt People. This dispute was due in large part to the corruption among the Roman elite. Sulla eventually revived the office of the dictator to purge the elite of corruption, reform the Roman constitutional laws, restore the supremacy of the senate and, interestingly, limit the power of the consuls.

This is the fork in the road for Trump. He can be like Jugurtha and continue to try and exploit gaps in the managerial system to get what he wants, or he can take on the system itself through the use of hard power. In the modern sense, this means defying the courts and using the law to drive off the people who think litigation against Trump is a proper use of their time. In other words, Trump must become the sort of dictator his opponents claim, to restore republican rule.

Historical comparisons are never perfect, and Trump is certainly not Sulla, but the underlying comparison still works. If there is any hope of saving the United States from plunging into the eternal darkness, the problems created by the discredited managerial system must be quickly addressed. This mean rapidly clearing out the alien population, restoring normal economic policies and withdrawing from the many outposts of the Global American Empire.

These are not things possible within the rules because the rules are designed to prevent such an outcome. This means these changes must not only happen outside the rules, but in direct contradiction of the rules. There is no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do, which is the core motivation of the people called the right. The results we see and hate are the point of the system, so the system must change.

That can only happen against the will of the system, because the people in the system have anchored their lives to assumption that the system will never change. This is the problem Sulla faced and the problem Jugurtha was able to exploit. Within every corrupt political system there is a Jugurtha and a Sulla. The question is which one emerges victorious, and this is the question at Trump’s 100th day mark. Will Donald Trump be forgotten as Jugurtha or will be he remembered as Sulla.

The Old Tricksters

Posted on April 28, 2025 by thezman

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One of the tricks played upon the American people since the middle of the last century has been to take unreasonable ideas and cloak them in reasonableness so that reasonable people will embrace them. The main tool for doing this has been the people we call conservatives. One of their main tasks is to take the radical ideas of the people they claim to oppose, make these ideas sound reasonable and then offer up a plan to implement these ideas in a reasonable way.

A great example of this is civil rights. Conservatives eventually came to defend and promote the cause on the grounds that it was always a conservative value, as equality before the law is a first principle of conservatism. You see, civil rights were about applying the existing law to all people. Specifically, it was about granting equality before the law to black people in the South, where those bad whites have been willfully excluding black people from the constitutional order.

Of course, the civil right agenda was vastly more radical and utopian. That is made clear in the Brown decision, which declares all discrimination is assumed to be immoral and unconstitutional by default. Therefore, anyone seeking to exercise their freedom of association must first get permission from the court. Further, it says that diversity is the highest goal, so all public policy must bend towards it. Three generations of social destruction have been the result of this new moral order.

We are now seeing the same trick being played with regards to DEI. At its core, what DEI does is take the open society claims in Brown and formalize them as a set of rules and measures that apply everywhere. It is not enough for you, a white person, to not discriminate against nonwhites. You must commit your life to rooting out those who continue to discriminate and you must seek to remove anything that can cause something other than the ideal open society.

This is, of course, complete madness, which is why reasonable people have concluded that the people behind it are crazy. As these pogroms were unleashed on the public, the public found ways to revolt, even when questioning the goals and policies of DEI was said to be worse that slavery. The general disgust with these programs and the people promoting them is what made it possible for the President of the United States to go on the offensive against the federal civil rights regime.

Luckily for the crazies, the conservatives have a solution. Their task now is to take these repugnant ideas and make them seem reasonable. You see it in this Heather MacDonald column that seems to support Trump’s efforts to remove antiwhite policies from the government. She repeats the familiar critiques of the diversity agenda, which is refreshing, coming from a conservative. Then she slips in the poison pill that goes unnoticed under all the reasonableness.

Down near the bottom, she writes, “The White House needs to persuade Congress to clarify that civil rights mean freedom from discrimination.” Most reasonable people would not think much of that line, but it is the most important sentence in the whole piece and the most racial thing you could read anywhere. It is the core claim of the race communists since all of this started almost century ago. It is the upending of the core idea of the liberal society in favor of utopianism.

Rights, as normal people understand them, are things you have as a feature of you being a human being. No one must do anything for you to exercise your right to speech or your freedom of religion. Rights are negative rights because they prohibit others, mostly the government, from preventing you from exercising your rights. It is the reason the First Amendment starts with the words, “Congress shall make no law.” You have your rights unless someone tries to deny them to you.

Now, consider the claim that you have freedom from discrimination. The only way you can be free of discrimination is if everyone else does something and that something is associate with you. In other words, everyone must do something for you to have this right, which is the opposite of our notion of rights. Of course, the only way this can happen is by force. People will naturally wish to associate with who they like for any reason they like, so they must be prevented from doing this.

What MacDonald is doing is the old conservative trick of affirming the moral claims of the people they claim to oppose, while pretending to oppose them. Every time one of the anti-DEI conservatives cries racism over these programs, they are affirming the central moral claim of the race communists, which is that any discrimination for any reason is immoral. Therefore, any means necessary is justified in preventing people from associating as they see fit.

Civil rights rely on the ethics of the penitentiary. The foundation of a prison is that the inmates must always seek permission to move inside the prison. Their freedom of movement and association comes at the permission of the guards. This is exactly the model the race communists imagine for society, as it is the only way for create a world where people are free from discrimination. You can only be free from discrimination in a world where such a thing is not possible.

None of this should surprise anyone, given the background of the Manhattan Institute and the man who underwrites it. Paul Singer is an open borders fanatic who embraces the same open society ethos as George Soros. He also helped fund the Russian Collusion Hoax through the Washington Free Beacon. Another feature of conservatives is that they tend to be bankrolled by the same people who bankroll the people conservatives claim to oppose.

That aside, it is an example of how conservatives are like a drug-resistant virus that even when they are despised still manage to cause trouble. The reason for this is there is always a need to make the unreasonable demands of the radicals seem reasonable enough so that normal people will go along with them. If DEI sounded unreasonable to you, no worries, the conservatives have a reasonable alternative that wreaks the same havoc, but in a gentler sounding way.

Old Lessons

Posted on April 23, 2025 by thezman

Wednesday, April 23 was supposed to be a big meeting of Western countries and Ukraine in London where the Trump administration would make its final push for peace to end the war in Ukraine. The meeting was canceled due to the Ukrainians announcing in advance that they were not interested in any deal that would require them to make concessions. This prompted Marco Rubio to cancel the meeting, at least the portion involving decision-makers from the administration.

The lead-up to this now-canceled meeting has been a microcosm of how the Western political system now operates. For example, the period before the meeting featured stories in prominent nodes of the Western information control system about the secret details of the Trump plan. The sources for these stories were never mentioned, most likely because they did not exist. Instead, it was members of the Kagan cult, former Biden people, or schemers in the British government.

It was clear that these stories were coordinated as they all featured the same narrative and much of the same language. For example, they dusted off the old 2024 narrative of a freeze along the front line, something Russia has always rejected as both unacceptable and impossible to implement. The stories also all framed the deal as a major concession by Putin, the subtext being that he is now desperate for a way out of the war he started for no reason at all.

One point of these stories is something seen constantly in the West. There is the belief among the managerial elite that they can meme things into reality. If they just pack enough versions of their desired truth into the information control system, at some point this becomes reality. This has been repeatedly seen with the war in Ukraine, but it has been a feature of every major event. During Covid, they operated as if the news stories they made up were true for a couple of years.

One possible explanation for this is that a key pillar of the managerial state is the assumption that people respond to information, so if one controls the information, one controls the people. Since another pillar of the managerial state is that reality is made by people, it follows that one can control reality, or at least the perception of reality, by controlling the people through control of the information. The old expression, perception is reality, has become an article of faith among the elites.

Another part of this story illustrates how Western elites are only capable of thinking one move at a time. The reason for the media campaign was that they wanted the Russians to reject the deal, so they framed it as negatively toward them as possible, assuming the Russians would publicly respond. There was no thought given to the possibility of the Russians remaining silent. They simply assumed it was inevitable because this was a pleasing narrative to them.

This meant there was no backup plan. Instead, they had to have Zelensky preemptively reject the deal to avoid a public catastrophe. This last-minute cancellation is about buying time, which is another feature of managerialism. Western elites now operate as if time is always on their side. If they cannot shape reality to their liking now, then they just need to wait until reality comes to its senses. In the case of Ukraine, they remain sure they can outlast the Russians.

This sense of time probably stems from the fact that managerialism is a world measured in process rather than tangible accomplishments. Normal people measure their lives by what they have done. The managerial class measures their lives by the networks and processes in which they are a part. There is never any pressure to do anything in this world, so there is no need to worry about time. There can always be another meeting to discuss the things discussed at the last meeting.

This sense of timelessness has infected their approach to Trump. In his first term, the plan was to put the brakes on everything and wait until he either quit under relentless pressure or was removed. When he refused to go away, they peppered him with lawsuits, figuring time was on their side. Now in his second term, the court system is tasked with throwing sand in the gears to wait out Trump. The same thing is happening with the Ukraine war. It is endless stalling.

This is what gives the West the same feel as pre-revolutionary France. The ruling elite of France assumed they had time, which allowed them to avoid dealing with the serious problems facing the system. One reason for the radicalization of the masses during that time was the sense that no one in charge cared about the growing problems because no one could see any action to address them. The apparent indifference to what was happening became part of the indictment.

A similar situation happened at the end of the Soviet system. Gorbachev was something like Jacques Necker, in that he was in his position to fix the problems of the system, but the system refused to be fixed. His failure set in motion the process that toppled the Soviet system. Similarly, Trump exists because of systemic failure with the expectation that he can fix the system. Like the reactionaries of old, the managerial elite assumes it can wait him out.

Historical analogies are never perfect, and that is true here. The French elite, for example, understood the system’s problems. These were mostly smart, educated men with a deep knowledge of the system. The modern managerial elite is populated by mediocrities skilled only in the sort of scheming that is the basis of drama. They also possess a stunning lack of self-awareness. The people thinking they just need to wait out Trump also think they are loved and adored by the masses.

Wars tend to be what break dysfunctional political systems. That may be the case with the Ukraine war. Everyone assumes Trump lacks the resolve to walk away from this situation and leave the Europeans to work it out with the Russians. If he walks away from Project Ukraine, the managerial elite of the West will have a chance to learn that they cannot meme reality into existence and time is not on their side, or they will cling to these beliefs as they head to the dustbin of history.

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